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Better check it for poison: Pope Francis holds a mate given him yesterday from Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, his longtime foe. Photo: REUTERS

The Latin American left is still in shock: An apostle of reform and church renewal, Pope Francis is a genuine champion of the poor, offering an inspiring alternative to the demagoguery of South America’s new breed of old Marxists and jackboot Socialists. So leftists rushed to do what they always do: Defame any good man or woman who threatens their power.

The accusation? That almost four decades ago, under Argentina’s right-wing junta, then-Fr. Bergoglio, a Jesuit administrator, “did not do enough” to free two priests kidnapped by the security services. Spearheaded by a government-backed newspaper, Pagina/12, the leftists imply that he must have been a collaborator.

That lie was discredited years ago. But it’s all the left has with which to attack this saintly man.

In fact, Fr. Bergoglio worked behind the scenes to have the two priests released. And they were freed, not “disappeared.” One died of natural causes in 2000, but the other, now in a monastery in Germany, states that he and his fellow priest were turned in by a lay collaborator. Years ago, he and the then-Archbishop Bergoglio celebrated Mass together and embraced.

It’s all on the record. Yet, when news broke of Cardinal Bergoglio’s elevation as Pope Francis — signaling by his chosen name that he means to be a champion of the oppressed — the mortified Argentine left and its regional allies dredged up their old fabrications.

Now breaking news from Argentina claims that the government waged a smear campaign among cardinals to prevent Bergoglio’s election as pope.

Why is Argentina’s dragon-lady president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, so outraged by the choice of a pope from her country, when she should be proud? Because Bergoglio, while shunning party politics, took an uncompromising stand against corruption. And the current Argentine regime is a paragon of thievery, lies and fraud.

It gets worse for the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s White House. Argentine opinion polls run hugely in favor of the new pope, while the numbers for the president and her economically incompetent and increasingly dictatorial government have been plummeting.

Faced with crushing inflation (about which the regime lies shamelessly) and increasing hardship, Argentine voters have a severe case of political buyer’s remorse.

And along comes Pope Francis, who literally kisses the feet of the poor, who’s admired by his country’s mainstream-Protestant, Evangelical, Jewish and Muslim communities and who rejects the trappings of power and comforts of wealth.

Each May, in Buenos Aires Cathedral, then-Cardinal Bergoglio delivered the traditional sermon during the great Te Deum mass celebrating Argentina’s 1810 Revolution. Even as the government crushed one free media outlet after another, it couldn’t silence the cardinal. He inveighed each year against public and personal corruption and growing totalitarianism. Everyone listening knew who he meant.

The government tried everything, even moving the Te Deum celebrations to other cities. Nothing worked.

Meanwhile, President Fernandez de Kirchner rejected all dialogue with the cardinal, refusing at least 14 requests for meetings. Now she’had to make a pilgrimage yesterday to pay homage to the holy man she mocked. (She tried, deviously, to turn the situation to her advantage by involving the pope in the Falklands/Malvinas stand-off with Britian.)

The new generation of leftist regimes pocking Latin America (the ruined Venezuela of the late Hugo Chavez; the silence-the-media tyranny of Rafael Correa in Ecuador; the living-dead rulers of Cuba, and Argentina’s economy-wrecking government) dread the possibility that Pope Francis will be as disastrous for Latin leftist regimes as Pope John Paul II was for the Soviet Bloc.

And they have reason to worry. Not because this pope’s going to play politics, but because he’s a man of authentic faith and integrity.

The left still spews its old rhetoric about the “workers and peasants,” but after the rally the leaders drive off in their limousines. Cardinal Bergoglio humbled himself before AIDS victims, then went home on the bus to cook his own dinner.

Suddenly, there’s a shining alternative vision for the “wretched of the earth,” especially those in still-feudal Latin America. If I were a leftist, I’d be worried, too.

The lies won’t stop, of course. But none of the left’s propaganda can alter the fact that the rest of us have witnessed the world-shaking elevation to the papacy of a man who loves the lowest of the low and believes that the poor are blessed in spirit.